Anointed to live

It all seemed to be over too quickly. So I pulled out my handy pocket calendar, which includes prayers over a dying person, and recited those. Then it seemed that enough praying had been done over Mom. I leaned back, satisfied.

We Catholics like our sacraments, especially this one, to be laid on thick. Hey — the person is headed for the great hereafter, so let’s make sure their suitcase is packed and tickets in hand.

Last week, in our final installment on the sacraments, our contributor Peter Feuerherd detailed how this sacrament is no longer “last” nor “extreme.” Instead, it has pulled back from the absolute end and into the middle of life — indeed, many times the life of the community— as a source of healing and consolation for the person as well as their friends and family.

The sacrament originates with Jesus, who healed and consoled so many of their afflictions, from the blind man by the synagogue on the sabbath to the woman with the hemorrhage who touched His cloak.

The early Christians continued in that spirit and anointed sick people with sacred oils. Over time, the rite evolved to one for those at the point of death and became known as Extreme Unction.

By the time of the Council of Trent in 1551, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the liturgy asked God “that the sick person may recover his health if it would be conducive to his salvation.” (Back then, apparently, religion was a more severe matter than in these lax days when we seek recovery just to go on living.)

Thanks to Vatican II, the Church council of renewal and reform that met during the 1960s, the Anointing of the Sick has become a richer experience that is given people in danger of death from illness or old age, even if they are not necessarily dying yet. It now involves a larger group, not just the body whose soul is about to fly off.

“The impulse to put the sick at the center of the ritual is exactly right,” novelist Mary Gordon wrote in the excellent collection “Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments.” She called the renewal of the sacrament, back to its New Testament roots, “one of the unequivocal successes of the Second Vatican Council.”

Now, it recognizes the sick as part of the community, rather than as a person estranged from us by being near death. “The sacrament of Anointing,” she continues, “touches that part of the broken body that doctors, social workers, and loving family and friends cannot approach: the part that, in order to be healed, must acknowledge its despair and travel from it to a place of hope.”

We should always recall the conviction of the early Christians that their faith had concrete results. Believe and be changed was their motto. Once anointed, “the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up,” we read in James.

All the sacraments, as we have read in the past seven weeks, bring grace into our lives, moving us from despair to hope and joining the human and the divine.

(11/05/09)